Cloaked in Christ
20th Sunday After Trinity
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord my Strength and my Redeemer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
For my sixteenth birthday, my stepfather took me on a road trip to Florida on Spring break. I hadn’t been to Florida since I was too young to remember, and I was excited for my first trip to the Sunshine State. It’s a long drive from Western New York to Florida, and I remember stopping in Georgia for dinner. As the waitress was serving us, she looked at us and said, “Hey, you must be from Buffalo, NY!” We looked at each other, puzzled. “How do you know?” my stepdad asked her. “Oh, I can hear it in your voice!” Now, I have been recognized as from the Northeast before, but something in my voice gave me away as a citizen of that region. I’m still not sure what it was, though I have since learned about some regional habits I have as a native of the Buffalo/Niagara region. Today’s Gospel lesson in the parable of the Wedding Garment brings out a question: at the great feast of the Supper of the Lamb when Christ is joined with his Church, will the King look at us and recognize us as part of His kingdom? And by extension, when others look at us and our manner of life, can they tell to what country we most fundamentally belong? Will we be cast into outer darkness as no members of that Kingdom, or is there unmistakable evidence that we belong at that wedding feast? The nature of this wedding garment, as a sign of our membership in God’s Kingdom, will be the subject of today’s sermon. Christ tells us that his parable is about the Kingdom of God. Sadly, I think that in many quarters of Christianity today, although the good work of proclaiming the Gospel is done, that proclamation has been made separately from the Kingdom. But the Gospel, in Scripture, is of the Kingdom of God. In Matthew 24:14, for example, Jesus tells us, “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” Matthew 4: 23 emphasizes that Jesus preached the Gospel as about the Kingdom of God: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” We should never stop preaching the Gospel, which is the good news that we are saved from our sins by the sanctifying work of Christ’s Death and Resurrection, but when we neglect the fact that the Gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, we risk letting our vision of what it means to be a Christian become distorted. We may begin to think of Christianity as something only personal, as only about an internal sense of faith. The Gospel is enormously comforting personally, but when we think of it as only personal, we may be tempted to see gathering together as a church as a nice bonus, like a club where we talk about our preference for Christ, instead of a mandated association with fellow members of the Kingdom, as we are taught in Hebrews 10:25: “forsake not the coming together of one another.” As the Anglican priest and scholar John Roland West put it, “The one special point of our Lord’s preaching therefore very emphatically included the setting up of a Kingdom upon Earth, which is called the Kingdom of Heaven” (3), yet he points out, “But too many of us fail to realise the Presence of this Kingdom of God Incarnate, we do not consider that His Kingdom reaches down from Heaven to earth. And too many think of our Lord as a King without a Kingdom” (7). How I am inclined to put it is, when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, do we only mean the second coming? Or do we translate kingdom to mean something only sentimental? Or are we asking for that Kingdom to be made manifest for real, in this visible world, now? Notice that the Lord’s Prayer connects praying for God’s Kingdom to come with praying for our daily bread. In the urgency of the Great Commission, I say we should pray and want to see the promise of God’s Kingdom manifested objectively, now, and realized internally in the real state of our souls, now, rather than be unpleasantly surprised later.
Many of Christ’s parables, in fact, focus on the Kingdom of God, and today’s is no different. In the parables, we have rich, extended similes which provide a comparison that teaches us how to think about this Kingdom of God. What is a simile? A simile is like a metaphor. A metaphor leaves its comparison up to the reader to make the connections, but a simile makes explicit the idea of comparison. So we learn that the Kingdom of Heaven is like the wedding feast of a king’s son, where the subjects of that kingdom have failed to recognize the importance of that occasion. For the most part, interpreting the parable is fairly easy. We read, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, and sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.” Similar to how an earthly kingdom had a father who was king who prepared his princeling son for kingship, God the Father prepared through the Incarnation His Son to be the ruler of the Kingdom of Heaven. But as subjects of kingdoms, even in a relatively good kingdom, do not appreciate their rulers, the subjects of the Kingdom of God were disobedient. So just as these subjects failed to honor their king’s directives as they should have and were replaced with others, many of the leaders under the Old Covenant failed to turn their flock to the Messiah and so would be replaced with other leadership: “Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests.” That this is the focus of the parable is made clear in the chapter previous to this one, in Matthew 21:43, where Jesus explains that by rejecting him the Pharisees were losing the opportunity to take charge in the building of his Kingdom: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” Those servants who should have been most equipped to serve the Bridegroom and minister to the Bride lost their place at the feast, because they did not take seriously the King of the Kingdom or their citizenship in that Kingdom.
The wedding garment signifies the fundamental aspect of membership in the Kingdom. Most of our ancestors are among those Gentiles who were brought into the Kingdom, and maybe some of us converted independently of our families or maybe some of our families have a long association with the Kingdom. But the metaphor of the wedding garment suggests the personal nature of membership in this Kingdom – we each put on our clothes, and where we go, our clothes go. The philosopher Aristotle thought clothing was so important he made it a category of Being. If everything in this story is like something in the Kingdom of God, then to what in the Kingdom of God does this clothing point? This is no small question, because to show up at the wedding banquet of the Son of the King is to be cast out into outer darkness. Isaiah 61:10 provides illumination on this question: “He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with a garland, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.” This garment of salvation is clearly not made by human hands. No merely human fingers are so refined and no soul so subtle that it can weave a garment of salvation. To this point, the Pulpit Commentary explains that it was possibly a “custom to present each guest invited to a royal feast with a festive robe to be worn on the occasion,” so that people coming to the wedding would be in the clothes specified by the King for the occasion. To be recognized as a subject of the Kingdom of Heaven, we must appear before the throne of judgment cloaked in Christ, as we can see in 1 Corinthians 6:11: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” Fundamentally, then, this means that our salvation resides in the work of the Holy Spirit immersing us in the sanctifying power of Christ’s name. As with the wedding garments, we can’t put our terms on what assures us of our salvation. Christ gives us the standards by which we can say we belong at his banquet. He says in John 3:5, “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Baptism by water signs and seals the baptism of the Holy Ghost – not as a work we do but as the work God does for us. Repentance, too, is how we dwell in the cloak of Christ, as it says in Acts 2:38: “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” I remember as a little boy at a wedding I was told strictly by my mom to be careful with the rented tuxedo I was wearing. Standing in it, I sneezed in my hand, and it was awkward when I had someone stop and ask to shake it as I was on my way to the bathroom. Of course. We don’t create the wedding garment by repenting, but rather are empowered by it and respect it. And just as it is the care of any government to ensure its citizens have their needs met, and the wedding hosts to feed its guests, we signify our membership in the kingdom by participating in the feast that promises the return of our King, as we read in Luke 22:17-18: “And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.” Are hardships weighing down your heart? Cloak them in Christ. Are sins besetting your thoughts, words, and deeds? Cloak them in Christ. Cloaked in Christ through the supernatural baptism of the Holy Spirit, we walk circumspectly about our spiritual well being, not as fools, because we do not want to live in a manner indistinguishable from those whom we would like to draw to the Table of the Lord through our testimony. Though we were native to the kingdom of darkness, we have been adopted to Christ’s kingdom of light, and in baptism, in repentance, and in the Lord’s supper, our prayers are strengthened that we can proclaim the Kingdom of the Gospel. Amen.